With all the Civil War-era cannons dotting the streets and our national military park and the importance of history and pageantry have in our community, it is sometimes easy to forget that Vicksburg is on the cutting edge.

Mississippi’s senior U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran announced this week that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Resource and Development Center would receive a $14.7 million contract to continue to keep Vicksburg at the fore of the computing world.

Additionally, Stennis Space Center in Waveland will receive a $12.4 million portion of the contract.

“This is an important award for our state,” the longtime senator said. “This investment is a vote of confidence in the quality of research and development conducted in Mississippi, including advanced computing capabilities that save lives and money by keeping our warfighters ahead of our adversaries.”

While the contract award, as Cochran points out, is a vote of confidence for our state, it is also a testament to Vicksburg’s role as one of the most important Department of Defense locations in the country. The ERDC supercomputing center is one of five Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Centers in the U.S. operated by the DOD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program.

Strength in defense is nothing new for the city that was once the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. But defense techniques have changed drastically since the mid-19th century. ERDC’s computing prowess shows our continued strength more than two decades.

“We’ve been a part of the supercomputing program for 23 years, now,” said Bobby Hunter, director of ERDC DOD supercomputer resource center. “Our mission is to provide supercomputing resources for Department of Defense scientists and engineers to perform modeling and simulation. We help them accomplish what they would have to do in a physical world, a computational world, basically.”

The work is as complicated as it is important, but all these years later it shows Vicksburg is still one of the best.